What is Public Culture
- A public is a distinct social entity comprising, if only in part, people who have not necessarily, and may never, meet face-to-face. So a public is at least partly comprised by mediated encounters. Publics can be studied comparatively.
- The creation and proliferation of publics is a characteristic of the modern world since the 18th century.
- Any society may comprise many publics, and certainly will encompass publics beyond political public culture. There may be counter-publics which oppose political publics, or there may be other or smaller publics, the publics of special interest groups or religions, for example, which escape the categories of an apparently dominant political public culture.
- Public institutions are not coterminous with a political public. The public institutions of government or of non-governmental organisations necessarily present one face to the political public. They may also fabricate a public within themselves. The life of rhetoric within public institutions may be a transformation or distortion of rhetoric in political public culture at large. Or?
- Public culture is often concerned with the work of social memory and a collective account of the past and of other societies and cultures.
- The characteristic relations of public culture are exploded interactions, i.e. interactions based on the tools and skills of face-to-face interaction, wielded through skilful play through media. But publics rarely, if ever, comprise only exploded interactions.
- The ethnographic study of public culture involves understanding the fine grain of social life, including especially the performances that constitute a public.
- The study of public culture is an especially useful tool for revealing the rhetorical edge of culture, i.e. the way in which cultural artefacts are used to persuade, convince and move oneself and others.
- Enacted roles, as speakers and listeners or as interlocutors, are written in to public texts, and can be inferred from them.
- Public enactments are skilled expressions of authority. The most active persons who constitute a public are skilled in such performance. The analysis of their skill, and of the skills of interpretation of their audience, show in detail the character of that public’s exploded interactions.
- The creation of a political public has been a necessary accompaniment of new forms of political life since the 18th century.
- Rhetorical language—in the sense of persuasive or moving metaphorical and narrative thought embodied in speech and imagery—is characteristic of language in public institutions.
- Public rhetorical thought may mask, rather than reveal, social processes, and especially conflicts of practice and interest.
- The actual experience, embodied in life stories, of members of any collective of people may reflect the rhetoric of some public or publics, but will often run beyond such rhetoric.
- Face-to-face relations and the practices associated with them will always depart from their representation in public rhetoric. The study of the contrast between public rhetoric and public performance on one hand, and the everyday face-to-face practices and performances on the other, is an especially fruitful strategy in the ethnography of a public or of a public institution. But rhetorical strategies occur in all speech.
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